The Friendship and Rivalry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton

 

In 1950s America, women were not supposed to be ambitious. In fact, women were respected for not pursuing their own careers and instead focusing their attentions on the home and family.

 
Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were born into this cultural moment and reached their formative years when this ideology of the dutiful woman was at its height. When Plath graduated from Smith College, her commencement speaker, Adlai Stevenson, praised the female graduates and pronounced that the purpose of their education was to help them become intelligent, interesting wives.
 
But in 1959, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton met for the first time at a poetry workshop run by Robert Lowell at Boston University. They were both aware of the challenges facing them as aspiring writers trying to get ahead and be successful in a male-dominated literary discipline. For this short period of time, a matter of months, the two women’s lives collided.
 
On a Tuesday after class Sexton would drive them to The Ritz-Carlton in her old Ford to drink three martinis and talk intensely about life, poetry, suicide, and death. Pulling up in a Loading Only zone, Sexton would yell “It’s okay, because we are only going to get loaded!” Then, over dishes of free potato chips in the hushed, red hotel bar they would pile their books and papers on the table, and talk. Both understood the tensions and challenges of trying to negotiate their way through the world balancing their desire to be wives, mothers, and writers. Both had a strong sense of social rebellion and a belief that women were more than entitled to their own careers.
 
This extract adapted from my book, Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz begins to explore some of these tensions and how Plath and Sexton found their lives a juggling act between the personal, domestic, and professional.
 
       ````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
 
There are two items in the Plath and Sexton archives that evoke a sense of social rebellion. Their address books.
 
Plath’s is a green snakeskin-patterned pocket-sized book filled mostly with her immaculate handwriting, notes, and annotations. The front cover has the word Addresses on it in embossed gold lettering. The black ink is shiny in places, almost wet looking. Sexton’s is a loose-leafed vibrant red folder that still retains an odd odor. When the archive storage box is opened, it exudes a faint smell of musty nicotine. The plastic cover is sticky to the touch. The front page has a vague imprint of the word Telephone engraved around the bottom of a square plinth holding a picture of what looks to be a once-gold tele- phone. This item was left on the top of Sexton’s filing cabinet by her desk at the time of her death.
 
Like Plath, Sexton’s address book was important to her, so important that she wrote a poem about it called “Telephone,” beginning with a clear, accurate description: “Take a red book called TELEPHONE, / Size eight by four. There it sits. / My red book, name, address and number. / These are all people that I somehow own.”
 
While the poem then muses upon all the “dear dead names” that “won’t erase” from the book, what we can see in Sexton’s list of contacts is how closely family, therapists, psychiatric hospitals, suicide hotlines, and pharmacies sit side by side with journals, editors, poetry prize committees, and university contacts. As with Plath’s address book, Sexton’s showed the range of people she was dealing with and the almost double life of housewife-poet, or, as she put it, “I do not live a poet’s life. I look and act like a housewife” until the point when a poem has to be written and then, she writes, “I am a lousy cook, a lousy wife, a lousy mother, because I am too busy wrestling with the poem to remember that I am a normal (?) American housewife.”
 
The tension of these two areas running alongside each other, the housewife-mother and the professional poet, was one that both women felt throughout their careers. But it was a position that was frowned upon at the time. Women were expected to sacrifice their careers to ensure a stable home. In fact, in more affluent homes, if women chose to work when the paycheck was not needed, they were regarded as selfish for putting their own needs before those of the family. Marriage and children were part of the national agenda and regarded as one feature that made America superior. Operating within the Cold War agenda, stay-at-home mothers were contrasted favorably with mothers in communist Russia who worked in dismal factories and left their children in cold day-care centers. American wives could be well-groomed, focusing on orderly homes and tending to all their children’s needs. As a result of this propaganda, by the 1950s marriage rates were at an all- time high, and women were getting married younger.
 
Despite the power of this message, neither Plath nor Sexton could fully accept this cultural norm. In 1962, in a candid letter to the sculptor Leonard Baskin, Plath admitted that she was only able to cope with being a wife and mother and all the domestic chores that came with it because she could also write, “which is my life blood & makes it possible for me to be domes- tic & motherly, which latter is my nature some of the time, & only when I have the other consolations & reprieves.” Sexton, too, records on numerous occasions the tension of being a woman as both poet and mother and how she felt displaced among other suburban housewives of the time. And yet neither could, at first, fully reject the societal expectations that formed part of their upbringing. Neither was there really a precedent yet that would support their breaking away from such domestic ideals. That would come too late for Plath, who died just months before the advent of second-wave feminism, a movement that surprisingly did not sweep Sexton up to the extent one might expect.
 
What Plath and Sexton did try to achieve was a subversive rebellion that increasingly became an open rebellion as they found their voices and their platforms from which to speak. If in 1950s America women of a certain class were supposed to sacrifice their own careers for those of their husbands, Plath and Sexton were having none of it. Both became increasingly outspoken in their poetry, prose, interviews, and correspondence while somehow balancing this against staying fairly conventional in their home lives. Marian Foster, a Devon neighbor, recalls how Plath insisted on going to the Sunday church services in town even though she despised them. When Foster asked her why she persisted, Plath admitted that she was concerned about what people would think if she didn’t attend. Yet Plath’s poems at that time are markedly hostile to religion, and her 1962 short story “Mothers” does little to disguise the local vicar whom Plath exposes as misogynistic and hypocritical. In a letter to her mother she was even more open about the “ghastly sermons” and the rector for whom she was full of “scorn."
 
Yet she still planned to have her children christened there. This rebellion and conformity ran in uneasy conjunction, often bumping into each other. In September 1962, when Plath invited the Fosters to her home for genteel afternoon tea and homemade cakes, they had no idea that that morning she had been furiously writing her infamous Ariel poems.
 
Sexton was slightly more daring than Plath in her rejection of conventional ideals and domestic chores. She sometimes tried to bake cakes with the children, but they often went wrong. Kayo, her husband, did most of the cooking. She employed a cleaner and someone to do the laundry. While Sexton occasionally expressed some guilt about this seeming domestic aberration from the expected norm, she also had the courage to stand by her belief that she deserved the time to write and would take it and use it.
 
What Plath and Sexton established was a position that would last for the rest of their lives and afterlives—that of women who refuse to be silent. Their voices were not just asserting some louder version of the oppressed female experience; their voices were confrontational and started to open up a space for women to express anger, disgust, frustration, and dissatisfaction. Rage became legitimized. They also began writing about the female body in a way that caused genuine shock and revulsion among male editors and critics. Plath’s poems, such as "Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “The Applicant,” and “Fever 103°,” were regarded as dangerously extreme. Sexton’s poems, such as “The Abortion,” “Menstruation at Forty,” and “The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator,” sent some male critics into apoplectic rage—rage and criticism that Sexton then took on and replied back to in her poems, which presumably left the critics even more paralyzed with fury.
 
The result was that Plath and Sexton were, and still are, regarded as both troubling and troublesome figures in society. Their work is subjected to the kind of misogynistic critique rarely heaped on other writers. And this gendered attitude filters down to their readers too. Young women are told they’ll “grow out” of reading Plath, that they lack any critical faculties, merely worship at the shrine of a suicide death goddess, and so on. They become objects of humor, no longer proper or serious readers, but rather devotees. Goths and emos who wear black with a death fixation.
 
Although both died young, Plath and Sexton have never really gone away. This presence is around in a number of ways. Their books remain in print, and their poems anthologized, ensuring their disruptive voices are still heard. They were, and remain, relatable women, if extraordinarily gifted poets.
 
 Adapted from Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz  : The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton by Gail Crowther, published by Gallery Books.
 
 
The inside story behind the parallel lives of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. By Gail Crowther. Fortune, April 24, 2021.

In 1950s America, women were not supposed to be ambitious. When Sylvia Plath graduated from Smith College in 1955, her commencement speaker, Adlai Stevenson, praised the female graduates and pronounced the purpose of their education was so they could be entertaining and well-informed wives when their husbands returned home from work. The postwar ideals of domesticity, the nuclear family, and the white middle-class woman who stayed at home dominated American thought until the mid-1960s. For those with enough privilege, a woman’s place was ensuring that a strong family unit would mean a strong, united society. Women were respected for not pursuing their own careers or ambitions. So, they had a lot to look forward to then.
 
Six years after graduation, when she was writing The Bell Jar, Plath satirized this viewpoint with the memorable lines: “What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.” But subversively, Plath’s narrator, the sassy and wry Esther Greenwood, declared, “The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way.”
 
Far from planning to be a well-informed and interesting wife, Plath’s protagonist wanted an ambitious and varied future on her own terms. She rejected gendered double standards in all their forms, declaring that if men could do what they wanted and have sex with whom they wanted, so could she. One can only imagine how men must have withered beneath her gaze. Upon her first glimpse of male genitalia, Esther Greenwood pondered, “The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.” (Hetero)sexual liberation had its drawbacks.
 
In 1959, when Anne Sexton won a fellowship to study poetry under the greatly respected American poet Theodore Roethke, she wrote sarcastically to her poet friend Carolyn Kizer that he probably wouldn’t like her work and she’d be left sobbing in her “cave of womanhood.” More seriously, though, Sexton described the frustration of “kicking at the door of fame that men run and own and won’t give us the password for.”
 
But in 1950s America, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton met for the first time. Both were emerging poets, and both were hugely ambitious women in a cultural moment that did not know how to deal with ambitious women. They realized that to pursue their desire to be writers would require determination, energy, and resilience. Operating in a male-dominated discipline was not easy, and their rebellion against the status quo seethed just below the surface.
 
Curiously, Plath and Sexton both grew up in Wellesley, a suburb of Boston, but never met during their teenage years. When their paths did finally cross, Plath was 26 and Sexton was 30. Their meeting was dramatic and literary,  in a writing workshop at Boston University run by the well-known poet Robert Lowell.
 
Throughout the spring of 1959, on a Tuesday afternoon between 2 and 4 p.m., Plath and Sexton shared the same seminar space, room 222 at 236 Bay State Road. This room still exists today: tiny, with creaking wooden floors, a book-lined wall, and three airy windows offering a glimpse of the Charles River. It is a space that seems too small to have housed the personalities of Lowell, Sexton, and Plath. Sexton described it as “a dismal room the shape of a shoe box. It was a bleak spot, as if it had been forgotten for years, like the spinning room in Sleeping Beauty’s castle.”
 
The two women spent hours reading their poems, listening to about 18 other students, and taking advice from Lowell about what they were working on. The atmosphere was mostly awkward silences, slight terror at having their poems chosen for discussion, and equal terror at having them ignored. Poet Kathleen Spivack, who attended these classes as an undergraduate student, wrote, “The experience of being there was nerve-racking.”
 
Lowell dominated with one question he repeated again and again, “But what does the poem really mean?” Often long, uncomfortable silences would follow, and students would make embarrassed eye contact with each other or shift nervously in their seats. Sometimes, for Sexton, the silences would get too much “so I act like a bitch… [H]e will be dissecting some great poem and will say ‘Why is this line so good. What makes it good?’ and there is total silence. Everyone afraid to speak. And finally, because I can stand it no longer, I speak up saying, ‘I don’t think it’s so good at all. You would never allow us sloppy language like that.’”
 
Students also observed Lowell’s moods and manic depression with some alarm, noticing how during certain seminars he simply seemed, in Sexton’s words, “so gracefully insane.” Insomuch as he was a brilliant poet-critic, he could be distracted and vague, and would become increasingly obsessed with the same point during his manic phases. He could lash out at students if they said the wrong thing or irritated him. One April afternoon, he was so agitated that they became convinced he was about to throw himself out the window. In fact, immediately after the class, he was admitted to McLean Hospital on the outskirts of Boston, where Plath had already been a patient and Sexton would eventually become one.
 
Although during these sessions Plath and Sexton tentatively circled each other, Lowell finally paired them up. Perhaps he saw a similarity that neither woman could see. Perhaps he saw thematic connections in their work. Or maybe it was just chance. Whatever it was, the two women were then connected and forced to work together, and from this point on their friendship took a different turn. Plath had a grudging respect for Sexton and was ambivalent in her praise. Her journal notes that Lowell had “set me up with Ann [sic] Sexton, an honor, I suppose. Well about time. She has very good things, and they get better, though there is a lot of loose stuff.”
 
Sexton, on the other hand, was keen to indicate that she was the trailblazer whom Plath, and other poets, followed: “She heard, and George Starbuck heard, that I was auditing a class at Boston University given by Robert Lowell. They kind of followed me in…”
 
What Sexton’s casual claim overlooks was her insecurity and fear at asking to be admitted. Her exchange of letters with Robert Lowell reveal a nervous, apologetic-sounding Sexton admitting that she is not a graduate, has not been to college, and has been writing for only a year. Included with the letter are manuscripts of “The Musicians,” “Consorting with Angels,” “Man and Wife,” and “Mother and Jack and the Rain.” Lowell responded warmly, assuring Sexton that of course she qualified for the course and that he had read her poems with admiration and envy. An elated Sexton replied, saying she planned to frame his letter and would require no further praise from anyone for “possibly a month.”
 
As with all small literary circles there was competition and jealousy among the same people applying for the same prizes, fellowships, and publishing opportunities. Literary life in the cobbled streets of the Beacon Hill area of Boston brimmed with poets: Plath, Sexton, Lowell, Starbuck, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and W. S. Merwin. Plath immediately felt direct competition and rivalry over awards such as the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, an award she coveted (but much to her fury finally went to George Starbuck).

 
Students who audited Lowell’s class recalled the polar differences between Sexton and Plath, who each in her own way created an atmosphere of awe. Sexton was often late, all breezy and open, jangling with jewelry, wearing brightly printed dresses and glamorous hairstyles, and chain-smoking. According to Spivack, Sexton was a soft presence in the class, observing keenly with her green eyes behind cigarette smoke. She used her shoe as an ashtray. Her late entrances were dramatic as she stood in the doorway, dropping books and papers and cigarette stubs, while the men in the class jumped to their feet and found her a seat. Her hands shook when she read her poems aloud.
 
Plath on the other hand was mostly silent and often turned up early. Spivack would find her already seated at the table when she arrived, astonishingly still and perfectly composed. Her pencil would be poised over a notebook, or she would be reading and paying no attention to the comings and goings, the chair scrapings and nervous coughing. Occasionally Spivack found Plath a little restless and preoccupied, pleasant but noncommittal, with an intent, unnerving stare.
 
In contrast to Sexton’s appearance, Plath wore her hair pulled severely into a bun and owned a range of sensible buttoned-up shirts and cardigans. Her camel hair coat would either be carefully folded over the back of her chair or wrapped around her shoulders. She mostly took the seat at the foot of the table, directly opposite Lowell, and was the only student there who was not out intellectualized by him. None of his obscure references were obscure to Plath; she was impeccably educated. When she did speak it was often to make a devastating comment about somebody else’s work, though she could be equally brilliant at analyzing structure, rhythms, and scanning.
 
Most students were afraid of her. While outwardly Plath seemed self-contained and critical, those sharing the room with her could not have known the doubt, agony, and longing she was pouring into her journals: “I have a vision of the poems I would write, but do not. When will they come?” she asked plaintively in March 1959.
 
At this early stage in their writing careers, both Sexton and Plath were married, seemingly living the conventional lifestyle expected of white, middle-class, heterosexual American women lucky enough to have a certain level of privilege. Sexton’s husband, Alfred Muller Sexton II, known as Kayo, worked in her family’s business selling wool samples. Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, was an increasingly well-known poet whose success at that stage easily eclipsed Plath’s. But running alongside this surface acceptance of the dutiful housewife was an underlying rejection of suffocating gender roles and expectations.
 
Plath mostly vented these frustrations in her journals, complaining about herself, her husband, her writer’s block, and her fury at rejections and failed applications. Sexton took lovers, and in the spring of 1959 she began an affair with her classmate George Starbuck. He, too, was an emerging poet and a junior editor at the publishing house Houghton Mifflin. The poet-editor Peter Davison recalls Starbuck being “all knees and elbows, tall as a crane with great shadows under his eyes, and a slow melancholy, throw-away manner of speaking…”
 

This affair developed under the watchful and disapproving eye of Plath, who decided the best way to deal with it was to turn it into a story: “Here is horror. And all the details.”
 
The affair was almost certainly sparked by the after-class drinking that Plath, Sexton, and Starbuck started soon after encountering one another. Following the seminar, the three of them would pile into the front seat of Sexton’s old Ford Saloon and drive through Boston to the Ritz-Carlton on the edge of the Public Garden. Here, Sexton would pull into a loading-only zone, yelling at bemused hotel workers, “It’s okay, because we are only going to get loaded!”
 
Then Starbuck would hold out his arms and Plath and Sexton would take one each and drink, in Sexton’s words, “three or four or two martinis” in the lounge bar of the hotel. Sexton recalled the hushed quiet, plush, dark-red carpeting, leather chairs, and white-coated waiters serving the best of Boston. The three young poets hoped they might be mistaken for Hollywood types with their books, poems, and fiery conversations.
 
The two women must have realized at this point the many ways in which they were linked and the sensibilities they shared. Poised at the magnificent door of the Ritz, it is tempting to look back through a ghostly history to imagine the conversations that must have taken place over martinis and free potato chips. Both women were demonstrative and enthusiastic talkers, becoming relaxed and louder as they drank more alcohol. If, as Sexton claimed, the conversations were fiery, they must have been talking about things that mattered to them. What might those topics have been? We get tantalizing glimpses and memories, details here and there from journals and letters.
 
Although they came from very different economic backgrounds, both women had overbearing and emotionally demanding mothers. From a young age, both were ambitious in a subversive gendered way, thinking and acting in a manner that was regarded as unusual for women at that time. Neither accepted the double standards regarding sexual pleasure, relationships, marriage, children, and careers. They could only cope with domestic and social expectations if they gave priority to their own time and ambitions. Women were not supposed to even think this in 1950s America, nor were they supposed to leave their husbands waiting for them at home while they went out to drink martinis with friends and lovers in the middle of the afternoon.
 
Family, poetry, husbands, sex, and Boston gossip in general were all fascinating topics. But Plath and Sexton shared an experience that overshadowed all other conversations that took place at the Ritz bar: they had both survived suicide attempts and mental illness.
 
“We talked death with burned-up intensity,” said Sexton. Yes, they knew, in Sexton’s phrasing, that it was “sick,” but they felt death made them more real. Plath had survived a suicide attempt six years earlier when, at age 20, she hid away in a crawl space of the family home and took a large quantity of sleeping pills. Although this was a determined effort to die, Plath took too many pills and vomited them back up. She gradually came to consciousness two days later with a nasty gash under her right eye where she had repeatedly banged her head on the concrete ground. Sexton had survived numerous suicide attempts, all overdoses, some more serious than others.
 
These death conversations were treated as scandalous gossip, swapping stories in loving detail under the mostly silent gaze of George Starbuck. “It is a wonder we didn’t depress George with our egocentricity,” wrote Sexton. Both women were seeing therapists, and Sexton was completely open about this. Her daughter Linda observed that her mother had no sense of privacy, so if death and suicide were on the table, it seems likely therapy would be too.
 
After their afternoon drinking at the Ritz, they would weave through the streets of Boston to the Waldorf Cafeteria on Tremont Street for a 70-cent dinner and then Sexton would drive to an evening appointment with her psychiatrist in the city. Plath was in weekly therapy sessions with Dr. Ruth Beuscher, who had treated her immediately following her suicide attempt in 1953. Sexton recalled during these death-suicide talks that they would fix their eyes intently on each other, soaking up the gossip and the details while devouring dish after dish of free potato chips. Aware that this was unusual, that people could not understand the fascination, Sexton was always asked “Why, why?” She tried to answer in her poem “Wanting to Die.” “But suicides have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.”
 
Which tools, she said, was the fascination.
 
These strange conversations formed the basis of their brief but intense friendship, a friendship based on rivalry, respect, and admiration. Now, years later, the poets are long gone from the Ritz, and the martinis consumed. But the aftermath of those conversations ripple uneasily through time and space. This is partly because both poets trouble what society and culture does to women. Their voices disrupt dominant ideals as their poems tear apart unfaithful men, gender expectations, the difficulties of marriage, how it feels to be a mother, a woman, a woman who menstruates, suffers miscarriages, who enjoys masturbation and sex.
 
On those springtime Boston afternoons during their confessional drinking, Plath and Sexton were more radical than they realized. They began to pave the way for the rest of us. For although Sexton felt as though they were kicking at the door of fame waiting for men to share the password, in the end, the two poets kicked the door down anyway, no password needed, and found their own fame, on their own terms. We, at this later point in time, are lucky to see what is on the other side of that door.
 
Excerpted from Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton,  published by  Gallery Books.
 
On the Friendship and Rivalry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. By Gail Crowther.LitHub, April 28, 2021.
 

Emily Van Duyne  talks with her friend Gail Crowther, about her book Three Martini Afternoons At The Ritz. Gail’s book is a dual biography of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and looks at their lives and work through the lens of rebellion. Plath and Sexton were rebels in pencil skirts raising babies and writing some of the best poems of the 20th century, and Gail’s book explores that with vigor and joy.  Van Duyne and Crowther discuss Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes, the Rosenstein papers, sexism, and why it’s necessary to distinguish between Sylvia Plath and “Sylvia Plath.”.
 
Gail Crowther: Three Martini Afternoons Interview. Loving Sylvia Plath  , April 22, 2021

Sociologist and author Gail Crowther joins Zibby Owens  to talk about her latest book, Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton, and the incredible history behind it. Gail shares the ghostly experience she had while conducting archival research, why she wants to argue against stereotyping these two poets as crazy women, and the story of how she first fell in love with Sylvia Plath.
 
Gail Crowther, Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz. Moms Don't Have Time To Read Books, April 22, 2021.

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton in Robert Lowell’s poetry class in Boston are the stuff of lore, fostered by Sexton’s rollicking report, including how she would park in the loading zone of the Ritz and say it was okay because they were going to get loaded. The tales in Plath biographies about the raucous roundelays of these two poets are supplemented by Kathleen Spivack’s first-hand, sensitive account about their classroom behavior in With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz & Others (2012). Gail Crowther, author of The Haunted Reader and Sylvia Plath (2017) and co-author of These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath (2017), has not only mastered the literature in which both Plath and Sexton appear but has also done her original archival research and consultations with one of Sexton’s daughters and with Plath’s friend, Elizabeth Compton Sigmund. The result is an engrossing book that challenges the very limits of what we think we know about Plath and Sexton.

 
Part of Crowther’s purpose, although she does not state it is to continue the mission evident in Heather Clark’s Plath biography of situating these poets in the pressures of their cultural contexts, showing how alone they remained as they challenged the notions of what women could accomplish as writers, wives, and mothers. They were quite different personalities and poets. There is a kind of looseness in Sexton that is her greatest strength and limitation, writing as a poet of the viscera that is bold and inevitably called “confessional.” Sometimes she does not know when to quit and accept the perfection of verse that Plath achieved with such vigor in her final poems, overcoming her earlier tendency to stifle spontaneity in a quest for formal precision. For all their differences, however, these rivals inspired and pilfered from one another in mutually beneficial ways.
 
Both ended as suicides in desperation and despair, but also in an excruciating understanding of how their lives had reached their limits. Both readily talked about suicide in their Ritz revelry. They were dead serious about the right to annihilate themselves. They “felt death made them more real,” Crowther notes. Were they wrong to think so? Crowther does not pose such a question, but it is worth answering in so far as acknowledging they both keenly wanted the attention of posterity and therefore how they died, and when they died, was of signal importance to them.

 
For very different reasons, as Crowther shows, both needed support systems that men took for granted and that allowed men to weather their depressions. For a time, in their marriages—however fraught—these women did have a kind of infrastructure of home and family, although Plath was much better at organizing herself, her husband, and their two children. In fact, she was so good at organizing that her husband Ted Hughes, as Crowther shows, was quite bereft without her, even though he left because he did not want to be organized!
 
Crowther deplores the pathographies that see in every sadness and depression warning signs of demise. To be sure, the signs are there, but so is the evidence of Sexton’s and Plath’s ebullience and power. They both knew how to eat men like air. But men were not their only problem. As Crowther notes, “both women had overbearing and emotionally demanding mothers,” and try as they might, these poets also found it difficult not to be “overbearing and emotionally demanding.” Did they discuss as much at the Ritz? Crowther can only speculate: “It seems unlikely Plath and Sexton would not talk about their mother-daughter relationships.” Both women also liked to talk about the men in their lives. Crowther asks: “Did they gossip about their husbands and dramatic marriages over their third martini at the Ritz while these very husbands were at home waiting for them to return?”
 
Crowther gets at what was going on inside these poets, what they were like, by piling up the material evidence. So she compares their address books, Plath’s “neat and self-contained”; Sexton’s “wilder and more flamboyant.” Yet both books “have in common . . . the merging of the domestic with professional.” The lives of these women were full of business of all kinds and certainly more than their husbands were capable of, who did not have to balance, in Crowther’s words, “rebellion and conformity.” Women were taught to be perfect at everything that Plath especially took to heart. It was a reaction to “learned behavior,” not “neurosis,” Crowther points out, that provoked these women’s breakdowns.
 
In a horrifying chapter about mental illness, Crowther delineates the malpractice of medical professionals who prescribed untested drugs and delivered unproven therapies like insulin shock that made for no discernible improvement. To be institutionalized deprived these women of the support they received from women friends. Crowther reports: “Connie Taylor Blackwell, a Boston friend of Plath’s, described how they would often meet and drink sherry and talk about ‘the void.’ It was a big topic, claimed Blackwell, because at the time, in the 1950s, women were being pushed in so many directions that the attraction of nothingness for them was very real. Women, quite simply, got exhausted by it all. . . . There is a reason why more women than men are diagnosed with depression. There is a reason why most people diagnosed with depression who are given drugs are women.” Sexton and Maxine Kumin, a mother with young children at home, spent hours on the phone critiquing their poetry. Kumin grounded Sexton and yet kept their collaborations “relatively secret because they feared people would lump them together and see them as alike. It was a struggle for separate identities in a literary world that was hostile enough to women.” The Kumin effect is evident in Crowther’s account of a joint interview during which Sexton “‘waxes lyrical about female friendship . . . ending with ‘I think I’m dominating this interview.’ Kumin replied dryly, ‘You are, Anne.’”

 
Crowther is a sociologist by training, and that background adds a good deal to her understanding of biography:
 
  “Of course, once they died, Plath and Sexton immediately became statistics, slotting into the cultural pattern and story of who was dying where, when, and how. The week Plath died in February 1963 there would have been at least ninety-nine other suicides, and an extra twenty-five to fifty who did not make the official lists. In 1974 when Sexton died, she fell into the category most prone to kill themselves, forty-five to sixty-four-year-olds. This impersonal information shows that sadly, there was nothing unique or doomed-genius-woman-writer about their deaths. They were, along with many other people, too desperate and wrought to continue living.”
 
Crowther does not ignore psychology or the material conditions of her poets’ last days, showing how difficult it was for them to retain equilibrium without marriage, although she does not argue that being single is the cause of their deaths. Instead, she returns to an evocation of how much it took for them to live, as evidenced in
 
  “the endless manuscripts they left behind, worked, and reworked; thousands of letters, teaching notes, business contracts, household bills, bookkeeping. But also, as Plath said, in the lares and penates of a woman’s life: lipstick smears on envelopes, cigarette burns on letters, coffee cup rings on poetry drafts, their personal libraries, recipe books, and in their perpetual struggle against the male-dominated discipline they were so determined to succeed in.”
 
Three-Martini Lunches at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. By Carl Rollyson.  Simply Charly, April 26, 2021.
 

More on the book on Gail Crowther’s website. And here. 

Sylvia's Death
 
for Sylvia Plath
 
O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,
with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom,
with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,
(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about raising potatoes
and keeping bees?)
what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?
Thief —
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,
the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,
the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,
the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,
the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet deed?
(In Boston
the dying
ride in cabs,
yes death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)
O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer
who beat on our eyes with an old story,
how we wanted to let him come
like a sadist or a New York fairy
to do his job,
a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,
and since that time he waited
under our heart, our cupboard,
and I see now that we store him up
year after year, old suicides
and I know at the news of your death
a terrible taste for it, like salt,
(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)
And I say only
with my arms stretched out into that stone place,
what is your death
but an old belonging,
a mole that fell out
of one of your poems?
(O friend,
while the moon's bad,
and the king's gone,
and the queen's at her wit's end
the bar fly ought to sing!)
O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O blonde thing!
 

Poem by Anne Sexton